This Week:

• Is Google a global brain?
• Places & Culture
• Scrapbook: Harper's Index
• Weekly Digest

IS GOOGLE A GLOBAL BRAIN?

Your brain—an organ approximately the size, shape and color of your hands when you clasp them to pray—is a dynamic storage system, an intricate network of neurons that communicate biochemically to yield knowledge.

Say "wires" instead of "neurons" and "electronically" instead of "biochemically," and that last phrase becomes a workable definition of the World Wide Web. Like a brain, the Internet is a mass of links that store and retrieve information. What a computer does when you type a query into the Internet Movie Database is comparable to what your brain does when somebody asks you the name of the lead actor in the movie you each saw on cable last Saturday. You can imagine a little bar on the back of your head that says "Loading . . . " while you fumble for the answer, until it reaches the tip of your tongue and then (on a good day) you blurt it out triumphantly.

But can we really think of the Web as a brain? And with their increasingly complex means of interacting, are computers developing a collective consciousness all their own, as science fiction (most recently The Matrix) has long warned?

In a May 2000 essay for Brill's Content, columnist Steven Johnson wrote that although the answer is clearly no, the reasons why are interesting.

Johnson was responding to the writings of Robert Wright (Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny) and the late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose notion of the "noosphere" is seen as an anticipation of the "global brain" brought into being by the Web. Drawing on such sources, many thinkers in the Wired set claim that the Internet will create not just a global village, but a global consciousness—an intelligent organ that animated life around the world. "To the extent that the Web has connected more sentient beings than any technology before it, you can see it as a kind of global brain," Johnson said. Just as the collective intelligence of an ant colony is more than just the sum of ants' individual brains, perhaps this global brain would amount to more than just the successful connection of various computers.

Johnson's problem with brain comparisons is that while a healthy brain is organized and coherent, the Web is fundamentally chaotic. He used the analogy of a city, which has streets and zoning and neighborhoods and order. You know where to find things, or at least how to get around. But the Internet isn't the least bit organized, it's just a random mass. "The Web is a space where disorder grows alongside overall volume," Johnson wrote. "The more information that flows into its reservoirs, the harder it becomes to find any single piece of information in that sea." Search directories like Yahoo! (or new clustering engine Vivisimo) are a human effort to impose order on the chaos. But search engines like Google can't rely on any inherent organization in the Web; all Google can do is find words that match what you type in and sites to which the most people have linked. (More about how Google works here and here.)

This struck me as a narrow point for Johnson to make in response to such a broad question, especially since, as he acknowledged, eventual innovations (including the ability to track who's linking to your Web site) would make the Web a little more orderly. A better way to go about it would be to talk about the human brain itself.

The brain is not just a mechanical storage system. It is also an ingredient of the soul. It holds data but, unlike the Web, it also cultivates wisdom. The brain participates in human ways of knowing that are not analogous to computers. When you're in love, you say you "know it in your heart." The Internet can't know this way. It can't imagine. It can't dream. It can't wonder. The brain helps us do all these things. By itself, the Internet never will.

Perhaps Johnson delved into this in the book that grew out of his Brill's piece. I haven't read it, but I did see his essay on weblogs in the Wired cover series I featured here last month. Blogs, he wrote, are a way to apprehend the Web through human minds, as records of a person's pattern of thought. Blogs have become the most helpful way to mine the Web, since we trust human agents as guides more than we trust machines in that role. What would have been interesting is if Johnson had tied this Wired essay to his earlier piece in Brill's, and tackled the resulting questions: Are blogs a triumph of human consciousness over "artificial intelligence"? Will individual human brains continue to command the mind of machines, and not the other way around?

Related:

• Steven Johnson's weblog
• Excerpt from Johnson's new book on the brain and neuroscience
• From B&C: "Computer Control: Who's in Charge?"
• From the Los Angeles Times: Search engines find less as Web grows

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Chicago Tribune:

STOCKHOLM — When you peddle drinks in the Ice Bar in Sweden's capital city, smiling—or is it wincing?—at customers' lame ice-related humor is part of the job. So is working in temperatures that hover at minus-5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit), serving up alcoholic refreshment in ice glasses to crowds swaddled in bar-issued parkas and mittens and boots, working behind a bar made entirely of ice, surrounded by solid-ice walls beneath a solid-ice ceiling. . . . The Ice Bar, which may soon expand to locations in other parts of the world including the United States, is advertised as the only bar on the planet constructed entirely of ice, from the infrastructure—walls, ceilings, tables, bar—to the accoutrements: Drinks arrive in glasses made of ice. Ice sculptures are the only decor. Full story*

KEARNEY, Nebraska — Ever since The Movie's release last winter, Phil Kozera has gotten questions about scenes in which Warren Schmidt, played by Jack Nicholson, rode an enormous escalator to view pioneer exhibits at the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument spanning Interstate Highway 80 here. . . . Other than [some] curious college kids, the About Schmidt effect on Nebraska tourism was negligible, at least until now. Maybe it's the weather, maybe it's a blip in summer sightseeing. But with the help of the DVD released in June, [archway manager] Kozera believes About Schmidt has brought people to the archway and given a boost to annual attendance figures for the struggling attraction. . . . Director Alexander Payne, a native of Nebraska, originally planned for Pioneer Village, another tourist stop 12 miles south of here in Minden, to get the lion's share of shooting with Nicholson. But Payne grew enamored of the archway, and it joined the state's landmarks and landscapes immortalized in films, starting with the Spencer Tracy-Mickey Rooney smash Boys Town in 1938. Full story*

• Last week's Places & Culture
• About Places & Culture

SCRAPBOOK

From the June edition of Harper's Index:

Amount by which total U.S. personal debt in 2002 exceeded total disposable income: $628,000,000,000

Days that AT&T ceased its TV advertising last March "out of respect for the U.S. military operation in Iraq": 3

Days that it ceased its telemarketing: 1

Ratio of the top weekly fee paid a Munchkin in 1939's The Wizard of Oz to the weekly fee paid for Toto: 4:5

Number of motor vehicles owned by Tom Magliozzi, co-host of NPR's Car Talk: 0

Year in which Detroit presented Saddam Hussein with a key to the city: 1980

• Previous Scrapbook: Canada's U.S. flags

DIGEST

• The debate over the march of "McWorld"—the global spread of American popular culture—tends to sort people into two camps: those who lament what they see as American cultural imperialism and those who are assured that local cultures are inherently resistant and can survive on their own merit (see sixth item here in earlier weblog). But the important question about mass entertainment is not Whose? but How good? Or so William Powers suggests in a column from the National Journal entitled "Sitcom Planet." A recent documentary on the American Movie Channel on American entertainment in the Arab world shows how complicated the situation is, Powers says. Local media moguls such as "The Arab Oprah" are the ones who cry out the loudest for cultural purity while doing the most to pipe American TV to their audiences. So it's up to audiences to sort the wheat from the chaff, whether it's coming from America or not. "The proliferation of U.S. media is forcing the rest of the world to take a crash course in how to survive the modern media jungle, where the good and the bad coexist side by side, often on the same cable menu.. . . . In a free society, you can't have one without the other." Full story

Related:

The centers of American power are Hollywood and Harvard, says the London Independent.

• One place where "McWorld" seems far away is Siberia, which author Bill Gifford is touring for Slate. Traveling by train, Gifford produces a vivid and clever account of what he has found using both words and pictures. He starts in Russia, where, at the site of the 1918 assassination of Czar Nicholas (and origin of mysterious stories of the survival of his daughter Anastasia), Gifford finds outdated tributes to the man who planned the family's murders. Later, Gifford writes: "Things seem to have grown bleaker—that all-purpose journalistic term for everything Russian—as we move east." Full story

Related:

Gifford's "Things to know when you go to Siberia"

Map of Siberia

• The question may be moot in mostly empty Siberia, but NASA researchers are taking a new look at how cities affect the weather. They are finding that "urban centers don't merely endure bad weather; they help create it," says Time. Clusters of cars and forests of buildings serve to trap the heat, raising the temperature by as much as ten degrees. Those buildings can play such tricks with the wind that they stir up "spot storms," highly concentrated bursts of rain. NASA and scientists at the University of Arkansas are focusing on Houston and revising their assumptions about its atmosphere. Full story
• Before we think of weather as too localized, the current issue of Nature has an article on African dust in Florida clouds. The article is unavailable online without paid registration, but NASA's Web site features two reports on how dust from the Sahara desert migrated to waters off the West Florida coast. The foreign particles create "red tides"—reddish water rich with iron that feeds the growth of toxic algae that kills marine life. The Saharan dust took about two weeks to travel to Florida, as NASA found by tracking it by satellite.
• Not unlike those transatlantic dust clouds, free markets are envisioned as a common connection among continents. In the current debate about Islam and the West, we tend to perceive Islamic governments to be standing in the way of global economic progress. But an interview in Reason with Imad Ahmad, a University of Maryland professor devoted to clearing up misconceptions about Islam, shows that market economics and Muslim thought should not be considered incompatible. Muhammad, after all, was a merchant (although the Koran's teachings can be hard to square with the idea of charging interest on a loan). The interview is provocative, and gets even more so when the tension between Ahmad and interviewer Tim Cavanaugh comes to a head (Cavanaugh demands: "You say there is positive potential in political Islam, but where is it?"). Full story

Related:

A closer look at Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations from The New Criterion

First Things on Christianity, Islam and tolerance

From B&C:

Conversation about books on Islam and the Middle East (award-winning cover story)

Muhammad through Christian eyes

Earlier in this weblog: David Blankenhorn on Islam, extremists, and fundamentalism (second item here)

• All this talk about global consciousness, transatlantic dust, and worldwide free markets would be incomplete without an article about universal Christian unity. What can vaguely but conceivably be called "the ecumenical movement" has hit "a pause or a hiatus or a bump in the road or a dead end," says Richard John Neuhaus in the current issue of First Things. He says the global church seems more fragmented and divisive than ever, even after a century-long effort to achieve harmony among Catholics and Protestants. Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson say they don't have inflated expectations for the new book they edited, The Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity. But they do hope to call the worldwide church—mostly Catholics and evangelicals (as though, Neuhaus observes, mainline Protestants were too hopeless a lot to be included) to a new level of dissatisfaction with disunity in the church. The book, Neuhaus says, is "part provocation, part plea, and part proposal for action." Full story

Earlier in this weblog: What do degrees of separation have to do with world missions?

• Feedback: E-mail nbierma@booksandculture.com
• Last week's Content & Context: July news in review
• Context & Context archive
• About this weblog
• From our sister publication: Christianity Today's religion weblog
• More reading links from NBierma.com
• Back to top

Nathan Biermais editorial assistant at Books & Culture.